


Cruelty of the Coin

by Xanthos_Samurai



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: Blood, Deviates From Canon, Gen, Self-Mutilation, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-03
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-21 17:31:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9559724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xanthos_Samurai/pseuds/Xanthos_Samurai
Summary: The Joker conducts a "social experiment" on Harvey to ascertain exactly how dependent he is on his coin with disturbing results.





	

The Joker didn’t so much walk down the crumbling staircase as fall down it with his feet just happening to land on each step beneath him. In one hand he carried a bag of popcorn – the sort commonly purchased from stands at carnivals or fairs. He popped a piece into his mouth every now and then, licking his lips to enjoy the salty flavor. 

The basement of the derelict building was dark and moist, dank in the heavy humidity of a Gotham summer. The Joker reached for a light switch in the dark and flipped it on, prompting half a dozen dormant bulbs to flicker back to life in their dusty and broken fixtures. The dimly-illuminated basement wasn’t much to look at, lit or not. The concrete floor was covered in a thick carpet of dust and the few windows had long since been overtaken by grime. It was largely vacant save for a simple mattress lying in a corner where the dust had been cleared. 

It was over to this corner that the Joker walked. A few stray popcorn pieces fell and landed in the dust in his wake, breadcrumbs in the gloom. As he approached the mattress, the outline of a man became visible. He sat with his back to the wall, an elbow propped up on one knee. A cigarette dangled from his fingers and trickled smoke into the air. The Joker drew to a halt and stood on the edge of the dim circle of light that encompassed the mattress.

“Hello Harvey.”

Harvey Dent turned his head ever so slightly towards the Joker, giving the clown the barest glimpse of his rotting left side. 

“Did you bring my cigarettes?” 

“Of course. I’m not one to deprive you of your little pleasures.” The Joker reached into a pocket of his coat and threw a pack down to Harvey. 

“No. Only the loves of my life,” growled Harvey. But he took the cigarettes and placed them in his lap. He brought the cigarette in his hand up to the right side of his mouth, where he still had lips. He inhaled deeply, sucking in the smoke before it could escape through the gaping hole that had once been his jaw. He paused a moment, then relaxed. Exhaling wasn’t necessary – he merely allowed the smoke to drift out between his teeth. 

“Ooh, someone’s in a good mood today.” The Joker sat down on the floor just outside the light, crossing his legs in the dust. “You’ve been so damn mopey lately – I was beginning to worry you weren’t ever going to snap out of it.” 

“Not all of us can always be smiling.”

“It’s the sad truth. So how does that work, Harvey? Do you wake up and flip a coin in the morning to see if you’re going to be mopey or bitchy that day? Because I gotta tell ya that the system is flawed. You need more options.” The Joker watched intently as Harvey took another long drag. The smoke rose and drifted around his head like a halo. “Speaking of your little coin, let’s see it. Pull it out.”

The fire had destroyed the nerves around Harvey’s left eye, so he could only narrow the right one as he gazed at the Joker. Not quite a captor, not quite a guardian, the Joker had kept him down here for over a week. He was given food, water and cigarettes but that was all. In return, there was no guard making sure Harvey stayed, at least no guard that he had ever seen. Only the Joker visited him. Harvey had wondered a few times what would happen if he did try to leave, but his mind didn’t dwell on it. He had nowhere else to go anyways.

The coin was in his jacket pocket, always close to his heart. It sounded stupid, but that’s where his father had always told him to keep it. It was one of the only times that Harvey could remember being close to his father. He reached into the pocket and removed the coin, holding it in his palm thoughtfully as the Joker spoke again, 

“So I’ve been wondering how exactly this works. You let the coin decide everything for you? As a true agent of chance, you have no control over your decisions.” 

Harvey didn’t answer. It sounded almost stupid when the Joker said it.

“I was thinking we could try experimenting. How about that? What does the coin say?” The Joker leaned forward, his eyes bright behind the paint. Those eyes followed the coin as the former DA flipped it up into the air and caught it in his palm.

“Yes.”

The lines in the Joker’s face deepened.

“All righty then, we’ll play the question game. It’s a fun one – you’ll love it.” The Joker leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. “If I had, say… a little boy here right now with me and I was holding a gun to his head, would you stop me from shooting him?”

The coin spun in air, the dim light shining off the rotating sides in turn until it landed in Harvey’s palm.

“No.”

“How about an innocent woman?”

“Yes.”

“Commissioner Gordon?”

“No.”

With each subsequent flip of the coin, the emptiness in Harvey’s eyes grew. The Joker watched Harvey’s humanity recede from his face like an ebbing tide. Harvey fascinated him. He was chaos restrained. Inside, his mind was fragmented and broken, but it was still held together by the memories of those fragile little rules that he’d put so much stock in as Harvey Dent. He wanted to see Harvey plunged completely into chaos. He wanted to see what it would finally take to do it.

“Batman?” The kohl-rimmed eyes bored into Harvey’s face, looking for a reaction. 

Harvey didn’t hesitate as he sent the coin once again flipping through the air. It wasn’t until the coin landed that he paused, staring at the ground for a moment before flicking his eyes over to his palm.

“No.”

“No?” The Joker began to laugh. “What a pity. Weren’t the two of you awfully close? I’d always gotten the impression that you and the Batman were all intimate.”

“Not anymore. Not since…” Harvey hesitated at last. “Not since Rachel died.”

The Joker practically whispered the next words,

“And what about Rachel? If I had her here with a gun to her head, would you stop me then?”

Harvey was silent for a long moment. The only movement he made was to clench his fist tightly around the scarred coin.

“Rachel’s already dead,” he snarled.

“I wasn’t suggesting she wasn’t. It’s all hypothetical.”

Harvey’s hand shook as he flipped the coin, but from anger or something else the Joker couldn’t tell. He stuffed more popcorn in his mouth as Harvey looked down at the coin.

“Yes,” he said. “I would save her.” Relief flooded Harvey’s voice and lit up the human side of his face. 

“How very fortunate for Miss Dawes. Always so many men willing to save her.” Joker began to laugh again. “It didn’t do her much good in the end, did it?”

Harvey’s hand clenched around the coin. 

“Don’t you talk about my R-”

“Don’t worry, Harvey,” interrupted Joker. “We won’t talk about your Rachel. I don’t like dwelling on the dead anyways. Or, in the case of Miss Dawes, the blown to smithereens.”

Although the Joker’s words burned him, Harvey was still an attorney. He knew when he was being baited and he knew how to avoid it. He exhaled smoke through his teeth.

“You keep asking all these hypothetical questions. Flipping a coin has no basis on things that aren’t right here in front of me.”

“Good point. Very astute. What could we ask you for the here and now?” The Joker grinned suddenly. “I could ask you whether you’d kill me or not, but we’ve already that that conversation and I don’t believe in second chances.”

“How convenient for you,” growled Harvey.

“Would you kill yourself if I gave you the option?”

“Are you going to give me the option?”

Harvey looked up from his cigarette to discover that the Joker was holding a knife out to him. 

“No,” said the Joker before Harvey could even reach for his coin again. “I don’t want you to kill yourself. That’s too simple. Besides, you’re too much fun to risk losing to chance, Harvey Dent. No, no, we can’t have that. I have something much more special in mind.” His eyes gleamed in the dim. “Why don’t you try peeling off your skin? You’re already part of the way there.”

The coin spun in the air. The cigarette in Harvey’s fingers was tossed carelessly into the gloom, the tiny red glow a pinprick of light in the dark. Harvey didn’t bother to wonder how the Joker knew that the coin would tell him to do it. It didn’t matter. The coin had spoken. 

He dug the tip of the knife into his left palm and dragged it downward towards the wrist. Blood bubbled up in the wound and flowed across his palm to drip to the floor. The Joker’s black-rimmed eyes gleamed and he stuffed handfuls of popcorn into his mouth, as gleefully as a child at a matinee. 

Harvey didn’t stop until he had carved off the skin off his palm and thumb. He worked the blood-slippery blade of the knife under the skin and began to peel it away. He let it fall from the meat and the bone of his hand to splatter on the floor. 

It hurt. Dear god it hurt. Harvey’s entire body was shaking from how badly it hurt, but he continued. He continued until all the skin from his left hand had fallen to the ground. He was already dead – more pain was meaningless. He ignored it, just as he ignored the Joker sitting scarcely a few feet away, eating popcorn as though he were a goddamned attraction. The lip darting between the scarred and painted lips and the popcorn pieces falling to the floor and landing just a few inches from the pile of his bloody flesh. 

He placed the blade of the knife against the skin of his left arm, preparing to begin to slice that off next. 

“Stop.” 

The Joker’s voice made him pause and he actually looked up at him. The bag of popcorn was empty and lying discarded on the floor. He licked the remaining salt off his lips and grinned at Harvey.

“That’s enough for right now. Gotta leave some left for next time or else it’s no fun.” He smiled almost fondly at the skinned, bloody remains of Harvey’s left hand as he rose to his feet. “I’ll see you around, Harvey. Try to stay in one piece until next time – the world’s more fun with you in it. Or what’s left of you.”

He disappeared up the stairs again, laughing.


End file.
